Family Vacation Day 1 & 2

We've been planning a true, legit family vacation since January. We decided to use some of our tax return for a fun trip because it's been a few years since we've done anything besides an overnight staycation {which has been super fun but there's something about getting out of town that rocks}. We decided to tell Cole we were going to St. George and then surprise him once we were on our way. Things didn't pan out exactly as we expected them to. But that's OK.

Danny took Friday off so he could help me pack and do some last minute shopping. Caleb was extremely helpful by getting into everything we were trying to organize and looked like the toad from Mario Brothers.

We picked Cole up from school and surprised him with a new iPod that we've been promising him for months. The one he had was so ghetto that most of the new apps didn't even work with the old operating system. He was expecting it in July but we knew he'd want to take pictures and videos on our trip so we surprised him with it early and he was thrilled. Danny and I couldn't wait to share the next big surprise. We got loaded up for a long drive and took off.

Caleb isn't the best traveler. He did a lot of yelling. The only thing that would stop the yelling was him sleeping, the 20 minutes of a movie that entertained him or us singing songs that he was familiar with. It was funny when we were all desperately belting "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain" just so he'd stop yelling at inconceivable decibels.

We made it to St. George and stopped at Wendy's for dinner. We surprised Cole with another gift that would give him a clue as to what we were going to be doing that week. He opened it and genuinely seemed so confused. We were recording the whole thing and he seemed surprised but not as pleasantly surprised as we had hoped. After we stopped recording, he was really teary eyed and said he was bummed that we weren't staying in St. George because he was looking forward to it and was excited to swim in the hotel pool!

Our sweet boy likes to know what to expect out of life and was thrown way off with our sudden change of plans. I knew he'd be pumped after he had some time to adjust to the idea, it just wasn't at all the reaction we expected!

After dinner we continued on to Mesquite, NV to stay the night in a sketchy casino/hotel. It was basically a dump, but super cheap and it had 2 beds so it got the job done. While changing Caleb's diaper before checking out, we noticed his feet looked like this:

Keepin' it classy, Mesquite.

We were on the road early so we could be on time to the condo to meet up with the property manager. We had a small incident on the way which I'll refer to as "The Ant fiasco of 2015". Cole found an ant on his seat and began to completely freak. We killed it but even after it was dead and gone, he wouldn't sit on his seat because he was so worried that there were more. I ended up climbing in the back seat and he climbed up front for a bit until we could convince him that he was in the clear. He literally held himself up like this for a good 15+ minutes. The poor kid was crying and so upset.

When we finally made it to our condo, we were all exhausted and sick of being in the car. We met up with Scott and Amy who flew out that morning. Lucky dogs.

We decided to just hang out, grab some dinner at Marie Calendars, stock up on groceries for the week and do a little bit of nothing since we wanted to hit a 9:00 ward the next morning and do some exploring. The condo was really nice and was just across the street from the parking structure at Disneyland. Best location ever. I'd stay there again in a heart beat.